forming the plural of nouns

If you've been using the flashcards, you know the Italian for "lemon", "grapefruit", "blueberry" and "watermelon". We saw last week that each of these nouns has a "grammatical gender" in Italian (masculine or feminine).

In addition to gender, nouns in both Italian and English have a property known as "number". The number of a noun is always either "singular" (one) or "plural" (more than one). The nouns above are all singular. Unless you're on a diet therefore, and only want one blueberry, you need to learn how to form the plural, today's tutorino grammar topic.

You probably know how to form the plural in English - you add "s" (or sometimes "es"). "Lemon" becomes "lemons".

In Italian it's just as easy.

Singular "o" (the masculine ending as you may recall from last week) becomes plural "i". Pompelmo becomes pompelmi.

Singular "a" (the feminine ending) becomes plural "e". Anguria becomes angurie.

Singular "e" becomes plural "i". Limone becomes limoni.

So if a noun is plural, and it ends in "e", you know right away it's feminine. But if it ends in "i", it could be a masculine noun whose singular ends in "o", or a masculine or feminine one whose singular ends in "e".

And that's about all there is to it.

It's also worth noting that nouns of foreign origin have no plural form. In other words their singular and plural forms look the same.

And occasionally you get a noun in Italian that ends in an accented vowel - like citta' (city). These stay the same in the plural too.

How easy was that!